Today's business environment is increasingly dependent on information sharing as the basis for planning and decision making. Although communication can be solely verbal, its efficiency increases significantly when other modes of communication, such as visual information, are used concurrently. Visual information can be effectively used to augment verbal information and to improve the clarity and structure of the verbal communication. In the corporate environment, communication is extensively based on augmenting verbal/textual communication with visual information, e.g., in the form of e-mail attachments, printed matter and Powerpoint® presentations. Also, application sharing and workspace sharing (e.g., Microsoft Messenger®, Netmeeting®, Opentext OpenView®, etc.) are widely used in desktop conferencing for sharing material between participants.
Although images, data or other value-added information can be readily shared on computers within the corporate network, this information is generally not accessible to users who are out of the office or do not have access to their personal computers. Typically, when an employee is away from the office, he can still communicate verbally using his mobile phone, but he can not share any visual information with the calling party, which could otherwise be used to augment the voice call and add value to the conversation. Accessing such material would generally require the user to first connect to the corporate network or mail server with his laptop to retrieve and view the material. This is very impractical, however, since it would require the person to have a personal computer and wireless/wireline access to a data network, and further require him to set up the computer, log into the network and finally find and download the relevant material typically over a low bandwidth connection.
If the user has a mobile terminal such as a “smartphone” or a Communicator-type of device, the device can also be used to access additional data over e-mail in e-mail attachments. However, downloading e-mail attachments can be time consuming and expensive, since normal application files—such as Powerpoint files, images, etc.—are not optimized for mobile delivery and use, and therefore can be relatively large, thus resulting in long download times. Viewing e-mail attachments also requires that the user's mobile terminal be equipped with suitable viewing applications, which support the received application data type and version.
As can be seen from the foregoing, the present solutions for augmenting voice calls with images, data or other value added information, disadvantageously involve many pre-requisites—such as having a laptop, modem access or pre-installed viewing applications—and many phases for setting up a data connection and downloading the information. For these reasons, mobile users unfortunately have had to rely on using voice communication only or, alternatively, have had to go through the extensive and time consuming process of downloading material using a modem and laptop.
Further, images, data or other value added information are often created for rendering on a target platform, the target platform often having reasonable storage capacity, memory, bandwidth, and a large (typically at least 14-inch diagonal) display. Thus, since mobile terminals may have limited display area, resolution, and rendering capabilities, the mobile terminal may be unable to render such content as originally designed, or the mobile terminal may render the content in an extremely slow and/or inconvenient manner. Internet-enabled mobile phones, for instance, typically can display only a few lines of text, while their ability to render images may be confined to grayscale or thumbnail-sized images, or no images at all. An extreme example of a display-constrained medium is voice. In this regard, systems, such as AT&T Natural Voices™ Text-to-Speech Engine, allow users to access electronic documents by telephone, by dialing in to a service that uses text-to-speech conversion to dictate the contents of the documents over the phone. Dictation is necessarily a one-dimensional “rendering” of text, however, and cannot express the complex layout information embedded in a two-dimensional table.
Conventionally, devices are unable to render such documents as they were originally designed due to limited screen size, resolution, and rendering capabilities take liberties when called upon to render such documents. In this regard, many Internet-enabled mobile devices restrict the maximum size of a document that they can render. For instance, most Internet-enabled phones that comply with the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) standard only support documents less than or equal to 2000 bytes. Even for those mobile devices (e.g., Pocket PC's and palm-based computers) that do not impose a strict size limit on documents, large source documents are typically broken into smaller parts because transmitting long documents at once over slow wireless networks can try the patience of users.